The cause of many cases of the major chronic diseases is unknown. Therefore, treatment is focused on clinical symptoms associated with the disease rather than the cause. As a result, in many cases, the treatment shows limited efficacy and serious negative side effects.
Recently, the National Cancer Institute (NIH Guide 20001) announced a program aimed to “reorganize the “front-end,” or gateway, to drug discovery in cancer. The new approach promotes a three stage discovery process; first, discovery of the molecular mechanisms underlying neoplastic transformations, cancer growth and metastasis; second, selection of a novel molecular target within the discovered biochemical pathway associated with the disease state; finally, design of a new drug that modifies the selected target. The program encourages moving away from screening based on a clinical effects, such as tumor cell shrinkage, either in vivo or in vitro, to screening, or drug design, based on molecular effects. According to the NCI, screening by a desired clinical effect identified drugs that traditionally demonstrated clear limitations in patients, while screening by a desired molecular effect should produce more efficacious and specific drugs.
The best drugs reverse the molecular events that cause a disease. Following the discovery of microcompetition between foreign polynucleoitdes and cellular genes as the cause of many chronic disease cases, the present invention presents methods for treating chronic diseases, methods for evaluating the effectiveness of a compound for use in modulating the progression of chronic diseases, and methods for determining whether a subject has a chronic disease, or has an increased risk of developing clinical symptoms associated with such disease.